How to Get Your Book Onto Pinellas Library Shelves
Library talks are the easiest events a local author can get, and the audiences engage harder than bookstore crowds. Getting into the collection is a separate process with different rules.
Series: Writing in Tampa Bay (Page 2)
Writing in Tampa BayThe Truth About Bookstore Signings
The store will usually say yes if your book is orderable through the standard channel. Then nobody comes unless you bring them. The signing is not the marketing; it is where the marketing gets photographed.
Writing in Tampa BayGetting Local Media to Cover Your Book
Tampa Bay has more working media than most metro areas its size. None of them want to hear that your book is out. All of them want a story, and your book is the credential instead of the subject.
Writing in Tampa BayFive Hundred Years of Selling the Same Water
Five mineral springs in Safety Harbor have been sold as a cure for five hundred years, starting when Hernando de Soto decided he had found the Fountain of Youth. There is a lesson in it for anyone writing a book.
Writing in Tampa BayThe Mound Under the Picnic Tables
There is a Tocobaga temple mound in a county park in Safety Harbor, and the park is named for the Frenchman who showed up in 1842. Which name ends up on the sign is the useful thing to think about.
Writing in Tampa BayYou Retired Here With a Life Behind You
Pinellas County is full of people who did something substantial somewhere else and then moved here, and almost none of them have written it down. The reasons are always the same three, and all three are wrong.
Writing in Tampa BayFinding a Writing Group Worth Sitting In
Pinellas County has more writing groups than most people realize, mostly meeting in library rooms. The useful skill is telling a group that will make you better from one that will correct your commas for two years.
Writing in Tampa BaySilent Book Clubs: The Format That Stopped Pretending
A silent book club is a group of people who meet in one room, read whatever they brought, and do not discuss it. No assigned title, no homework, no one pretending they finished. At least two Tampa Bay bookshops now…
Writing in Tampa BayThe Tampa Bay Book Festival Calendar
Tampa Bay runs a real literary calendar: a free four-day international book fair in Ybor City, an antiquarian fair, a university festival, and three community events built around local authors.
Writing in Tampa BayYbor City Is the Densest Square Mile of Material Here
Ybor City was a company town built by a cigar manufacturer in 1885, run through mutual aid societies that owned their own hospitals, and used by Jose Marti to fund a revolution. For a writer it is the densest square…
Writing in Tampa BayWriting at the Beach Mostly Does Not Work
Writing at the beach mostly does not work, and the failures are predictable. What the coast is good for is the other half of the job: the thinking and the deciding.
Writing in Tampa BayWhere to Write in Tampa
Tampa has better rooms to work in than Pinellas does, distributed differently: a bookstore in an 1891 stable, a university library, a 1926 movie palace, and the historic district. The trade is that Tampa costs you a drive.